Now it seems that the team at Start A Fire have researched the engagement levels of brand content on Outbrain and Facebook with interesting (and based on our ‘gut feel’ correct) results. The article is reproduced below ore can be read here.

Content is king, but who reigns supreme when it comes to getting real reader engagement?

Most of our time, whether on mobile or laptop, is spent consuming content. Brands understand that and leverage it by producing and publishing content. This helps increase their brand awareness, guide our opinions, and improves their own market position.

However, producing and publishing content isn’t enough, and brands must also distribute the content they have produced.This is where content marketing platforms such as Taboola, Outbrain, Facebook, Pinterest, RevContent, ZergNet and many more come into play.

Great brands get free content. You can see it in forms of rave product reviews, comparisons or stories about its great culture.Therefore, it’s logical for brands to put some effort in promoting positive stories, or in our terms “Earned Content”.

Brands are spending a significant amount of their marketing budgets to promote earned content stories, but they are blind to the actual performance of those campaigns. Since brands don’t “own” this content or have access to its analytics, the brands can’t know if people are actually reading its sponsored content or not. They are in the blind and can’t calculate campaign ROI.

However, that has recently changed with Start A Fire earned content analytics. In the past couple of months, Start A Fire handled hundreds of campaigns with multiple traffic sources and conducted the first research comparing campaign performance by traffic source over multiple campaigns, by different brands.

The first question was which content do people read more? Content that was promoted on Outbrain or Facebook?

The research compared thousands of articles from different brands that were promoted both on Facebook and Outbrain over the past few weeks and discovered that on average users spend 45% more time on promoted Outbrain articles compared to articles that were promoted on Facebook. The average difference of 45% is a significant gap. It can be the difference between reading the headline to reading the article. More time on page means that users are actually consuming more content, while for the brand it means more exposure. As a result, the data shows a direct correlation between time spent on the page to page scroll depth.

Adding the fact that on tested campaigns Outbrain’s cost per click was significantly lower than Facebook. The simple conclusion for these brands is to choose Outbrain’s solution over Facebook for promoting content. But as always it’s still worth evaluating each campaign before making a choice.

Facebook organic content performed better than its sponsored content, but Outbrain’s sponsored content still performed better with 23% on average more time on page. In comparison to other social media solutions, Facebook organic posts performed best. On average, when comparing the same article’s average time on page across different social media platforms, users who originated from Facebook spent 28% more time compared to Pinterest and 53% more time compared to Twitter, which showed the weakest performance.

The post Outbrain Verses Facebook Promoted Content – Which is more effective for brands? first appeared on Content Central | Content Marketing.

This approach to marketing does work but it is not an easy concept to sell to the South African market. For a lot of clients, this approach seems a bit ‘airy-fairy’, and because most of them want a clearly laid out plan that shows how any and every digital effort will translate into a sale, content marketers have taken practices and procedures from the traditional marketing bible, most notably ‘buying personas’ and ‘buyer’s journey’, to make the content marketing pill easier to swallow. Needless to say, this has led to some Frankenstein hybrids that consisted of just enough traditional marketing to keep the client happy and just too little content marketing to yield any notable results.

Stop Focusing on Marketing

Don’t get me wrong, creating personas to discover who you are speaking to, and figuring out what kind of content these personas want and where they want it, can be useful, but as soon as you add words like ‘buying’ and ‘buyer’, the focus in the minds of all involved shifts to selling, the content becomes about selling and so we alienate our potential audience who are looking for information rich content without the sales pitch. Perhaps the industry shot itself in the foot when we called what we do content marketing.

Start Focusing on Content

Personally, I believe that we should stop worrying about personas, buying stages and client concerns about making sales. Instead, we should shift our focus back to the core of it all: creating great content and getting it out there. Great content transcends personas, is shared, talked about and remembered and even has the power to melt the heart of the toughest of bean counters. If it moves you, you’ll want to be associated with it. If it moves you greatly, you’ll want to own it.

What does this type of content look like? It is company/brand relevant, information rich content that is presented from an emotional angle. You have to score big on all three fronts, but especially the emotional front because that is what hooks both the client and the audience. You want them to abandon reason, fall in love with the content and then rationalize their love with the educational value which it provides. This is how you gather approval from the client, and likes and shares from your audience. Add a subtle company/brand reference, and the concept behind the content will be viewed as ‘clever’, which will get them talking about the brand or company.

So how do you convince clients to stop focusing on the bottom line and to buy into the idea of content marketing? By not walking into a meeting and selling the idea of content marketing. By walking in there and selling them a great idea.

The post Stop Selling Content Marketing and Start Selling Ideas first appeared on Content Central | Content Marketing.